`Take Me Along' Charms, Sparkles At Dinner Theater

The Royal Palm Dinner Theatre has cracked open another chestnut and found a hit inside. Take Me Along is a charming 1959 musical about life in a small town.

The revival boasts a fine cast to deliver its poignant story, based on the revered dramatist Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness.

The music ranges from the fizzy airs of the title song to a series of touching love songs and an old man's wistful soliloquy.

It is the Fourth of July, 1906, in a small town in Connecticut. Richard Miller (Gary Richardson) is courting his high school sweetheart with scandalous verses from

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and prose by Oscar Wilde.

The boy's father (Jerry Gulledge) is editor of the town paper, his mother (Barbara Bradshaw) the compassionate emotional center of the family. His aunt Lily (Kay Brady) on his dad's side is a boarder; she's waiting for his uncle Sid (Michael Walters) on his mom's side to settle down and marry her.

You haven't seen a better-balanced or stronger quintet of actor-singers on the regional stage, especially considering that Take Me Along is skewed toward the braggadocio of Walters as Sid.

That role was Jackie Gleason's sole Broadway vehicle. Walters, nearly a ringer for The Great One himself, doesn't lack an ounce of swagger. He can sing, too, on a scale from vaudeville barker to nearly a romantic tenor.

With the Gleason persona well in hand, Walters also is halfway toward sculpting the lovable rake envisioned by O'Neill.

He's got the right companion in Brady as the spinster who's waited 16 years for the white knight beneath Sid's bluster. Brady is beguiling for composer Bob Merrill's lovely Promise Me a Rose, a theme song for wallflowers everywhere.

It's rare to see two mature leading ladies carry as much weight in a musical as Brady and Bradshaw, who plays the ideal wife-mother-lover. The two work splendidly together throughout the show.

Gulledge offers the stereotype patriarch of Life With Father with the soft contours appropriate to a musical. His ballad Staying Young is humorous and bittersweet.

None of these characters or their powerful subplots can obscure the main thread of O'Neill's source story, that of young Richard in the throes of first love. Spunky actor Richardson draws attention like a magnet whenever he's on stage. He woos Priscilla Behne (as a cute forerunner of today's Valley Girl) with unbridled enthusiasm in I Would Die, a musical declaration of love made famous by Robert Morse.

Director Bob Bogdanoff delivers the story's underlying poignancy with clarity while maintaining the surface effervescence of the libretto by Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof) and Robert Russell.

Set designer Gene Seyffer's charming array of period scenes is supplemented by bright costumes and David London's artfully specific lighting design.

If you're looking for something to hum long after you get home, you can't lose with Take Me Along. It's old-fashioned and winsome, and what it lacks in flash it makes up for in sparkle.